Producer Vs Consumer, What Are You?

Here’s a little trick to help you get off social media, make more money, and help your kids have an amazing summer as well.

On today’s episode Russell talks about what it means to be a producer vs a consumer. He explains how it is going to help his kids get off the TV for the summer and being producing something and finding their voices. Here are some of the awesome things you’ll hear in this episode:

Where Russell heard about being a producer of social media, rather than a consumer.

Why Russell thinks this concept is key to getting his kids off their screens for the summer.

And how becoming a producer will help Russell’s children find their voices so early in life.

So listen here to find out why being a producer is so important, and how you can use it to find your own voice.

Full Episode Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys are doing amazing today. I’ve got an exciting show that I want to share with you about the difference in being a consumer versus a producer.

Alright, so I’m really actually super excited for this episode for a couple of reasons. You know how when you learn something and you’re like, ‘Oh that’s cool.” And then like 3 or 4 weeks later it comes back up and all the sudden it’s like, “ahh” the angels are singing from heaven and it’s like, yes, this is something you need right now. This is totally what happened.

So let me rewind back to the Puerto Rico mastermind. All my friends who moved there, always, instead of saying “Porto Rico” they all say, “Puerto Rico” so maybe that’s how you’re supposed to say it. Anyway, so we were down there with Brendon Burchard and a whole bunch of other cool people. And there was one of the guys who was with us in the group and he has a really good business, but he’s not doing any social media. Kind of against it like, ‘I don’t do social media.’

So during his session when we were doing the little hot seat on him, you know we were asking him about that. And he’s like, ‘I just don’t have time. There’s so much stuff happening.” And then Brendon dropped this gold nugget that I thought was cool at the time, but then became cooler last night. He said, “Dude, you have to understand. I’m not a consumer of social media, I’m a producer. I don’t get sucked in and spend 8 hours a day on my phone, because I’m not consuming social media. I don’t consume it I just produce it.”

And I was like, “Oh that’s cool.” And I wrote down produce and don’t consume. So that was kind of the thing. And then last night I was with my kids who are super amazing, and Summer is coming soon. And so for any of you guys who have kids, hopefully this helps you as well, because it’s helping me right now.

So we’re getting closer and my wife and I are dreading, when school ends and now they’re home for summer, what do they do all day? Usually it’s like, they sit there and watch tv all day. And it’s like, we don’t want that. Or they watch YouTube videos of other people having fun while they’re in our house. And it’s like, I want them doing stuff and creating, and doing stuff.

So our first thought, one of our friends, they did a cool thing last summer, they did a screen free summer. And I was like, “We should do screen summer.” And I told my wife that and Collette was like, “Well, then what are they going to do all day. You’ll be at work and I’m going to be here with them, having to entertain them all day.” I was like, “Oh yeah, that does suck.”

I’m like, “okay, we need another plan.” And I started thinking more and more and all the sudden this thought from Brendon popped back in my head and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” So we sat down with all our kids and said “This is the deal. You have to understand there’s two types of people in this world. There are producers and there are consumers. Do you guys know the difference?” And they had some ideas that were way off. And I’m like, ‘No, no, no.”

So I was like, “Right now,” I looked at Aiden, he’s my little 8 year old, I said, “Right now,” I can’t remember, I think his name is Ninja, he’s this YouTuber who’s got blue hair, which is why my son wants to have blue hair now, which drives me nuts. I said, ‘That guy, Ninja, he plays Fortnight all day long, like 8 hours a day, and he records himself. He’s producing content and putting it on YouTube. So Ninja is a producer. Aiden, what are you?” and he said, ‘I don’t know.” I said, “You sit there and you consume it. You watch Ninja have fun, and you’re consuming it.”

So I said, “That’s the problem right now. We don’t want you guys consuming stuff all summer long. Because when you’re consuming, you’re not creating, you’re just sitting there being entertained. There’s nothing wrong with that right, there’s a time and a place for that, to be consumers, but it’s not throughout all summer long.”

And I said, “I want you guys to be producers. We’re having a screen free summer, where it’s screen free from being a consumer. You can’t consume social media or YouTube videos or whatever, but you guys are allowed to use the screen to produce stuff.” Because they always get mad at me too, like, “Dad, you have your phone.” I’m like, ‘You don’t understand. I’m not sitting here watching YouTube videos for 12 hours a day. I’m Instagramming and Vlogging and recording podcasts, and producing stuff for the world. I’m a producer.”

So I said, “A screen free summer for consumption, but you guys can use screens to produce.” And they said, “What does that mean?” I said, “Let’s have fun with this.” So what we’re doing is we’re creating a YouTube channel for the Brunson kids, I don’t know what the names going to be yet. But we’re going to have a YouTube channel for us. But I said, “Each of you guys get your own playlist, and you can create your own show.” And they said, “What does that mean?”

So I said, “Ellie for example,” My daughter loves doing crafts. I said, “Okay, so what you should have your own craft show. What that means is you should, in the morning you can wake up and say, ‘Dad, I need to research crafts today because I’m going to make a craft for my thing.’ I say, ‘okay cool, you can go onto YouTube and go watch a couple of people doing crafts until you get an idea for your craft. So you’re consuming but you’re doing it with a mindset of, I need to produce something cool.”

So she watched some crafts and I said, “When you’re done, then go drive your bike to the grocery store and buy the things you need to make that craft, then come home and borrow one of our camera’s or our phones or something, or our iPad, and record yourself doing the craft. Then you can take those videos you made on the iPad or whatever and put them on the computer, and you’re allowed to go edit the videos, and we’ll have someone come train you how to edit videos and then you can post that on YouTube. And maybe it takes you two or three days to produce that video, but now you’re a producer, you’re not a consumer.”

And they’re like, “What, we can really do that?” I’m like, “Yeah. What kind of videos would you guys want to make?” and they came up with hundreds of ideas. “We could do this, we could do this, we could do this, we could do a 24 hour challenge, we could do an eating challenge.” Aiden’s like, “We could go to McDonalds and order everything on the menu and try to eat the whole thing at once.” I’m like, “That’s a great idea.”

And I’m like, now their mindset is not like, ‘let’s sit down and watch what Ninja’s going to, how he’s going to play Fortnight today, for 8 hours.” Now you’re waking up thinking, “How can I produce something cool to put out there for other people to watch?”

So I’m sharing that with you guys right now for a few reasons. Number one, I’m excited by it, but number two, my kids are excited by it. It’s giving us hope for what’s going to happen this summer, where they’re not going to be sitting down and wasting the entire summer away, but they’re going to wake up every morning with an idea and something that they’re moving towards. They’re going to go out and start creating and producing and putting things out there. Number, I don’t know what number I’m on now, number 4 or 5 or 3, anyway, whatever number I’m on now, the next one is my kids are going to start finding their voices at this age. How cool is that? I’ve been talking to you guys forever, you need to find your voice, and most of you guys are so scared to publish you haven’t done it yet.

I’m going to start getting my kids to start publishing and finding their voice now, so they feel confident in front of a camera and making videos and editing stuff and thinking about ideas. And I was telling them, ‘You know right now, you’re not going to have a ton of unique ideas, go find other youtubers, and let’s say someone makes slime, let’s go make some slime. But the second time, let’s make slime, but let’s make your own version of slime, maybe put glitter in your slime, or I don’t know, skittles, I don’t know, make skittle slime. Now you’re taking that concept and you’re developing it. And you’re coming up with your own unique angles and ways to make it better, now you’re providing value to the world as opposed to just copying.”

So they’re getting excited, “Dad, we could do this with our slime. We could do this with this craft.” You know, all these things. I’m like, ‘Yes, this is how I want your brains thinking.”

So for those of you guys who have kids, I hope that gives you some ideas of something fun to do with them, and something that can every single morning wake them up and get them lit up with excitement of trying to do something, create something and producing something as opposed to sitting there, bored out of their mind, consuming something.

Alright, and the second half of this, for those who don’t have kids, or for any entrepreneur out there, I hope this gives you some ideas for what you should be doing every day as well. I think a lot of us, unfortunately, we jump on instagram every morning, and I’m as guilty as all of you, so I’ll take, I’m taking this all as lessons for myself, but how long, how many hours a day do you spend on Instagram swiping and scrolling? How many hours are you on Facebook or YouTube, or things? Or are you just sitting there in consumption mode, where you’re consuming?

What I would recommend all of you guys do is you shift your focus, like you’re only allowed to consume when you’re researching ideas for what you’re going to produce. So for example, I follow maybe a thousand people on Instagram, I log into instagram and swipe, swipe, swipe, trying to see, with the only goal of getting ideas, getting inspiration for what I’m going to be producing on my instagram channel.

So I’m scrolling and looking like, “Oh they had a cool image here, and a cool picture here, and a cool thing here. And here’s how they did a swipe up ad.” I’m looking at these things just to brainstorm what I’m going to create. So if I look at, you know, if I swipe for 5 minutes I can see 100 different people’s profiles and pictures and posts. For 5 minutes I can see a lot, then I turn it off. I’m doing it to research, not just to consume. I’m doing it because I’m researching as part of my production phase.

Same thing on Facebook or on Instagram or on YouTube, or whatever channels you’re publishing stuff on, but make it a finite period of time. ‘I’m spending 5 minutes today or 10 minutes today. I’m starting a clock and when 10 minutes is done, I’m done with my research.” And then look at as much stuff as you can, and get ideas of what people are doing and how they’re doing it, and just getting ideas of what’s happening.

In fact, it’s funny. At the Traffic Secrets event I told, everyone’s like, “I don’t have time to look at everybody’s stuff on Facebook.” I was like, “The only people you should be following on Facebook is your Dream 100, that’s it. The only people on Instagram should be your Dream 100. You have them, they should be your dream 100 and you’re looking at them to see what they’re doing every single day.” I look at my entire Dream 100 in less than 5 minutes to see what everyone’s up to, what they’re doing, what they’re publishing, what they’re putting out there, and then I can, based on that, get my ideas.

So I spend that time, and then the rest of the day is like, “Okay, I saw a bunch of cool ideas today, what can I create? I saw so and so who is from the fitness space did this. And I’m not in the fitness space, I’m in this space, how could I tweak that for my market? How could I do something similar for what I’m doing?” And it’s tweaking those ideas and changing them for yourself.

Anyway, I hope that kind of helps. That’s what I want you guys to understand, that the more you can shift away from being a consumer, and the more you can move towards being a producer, the more your income is going to go up, the more your skill set is going to go up, all these things. If I’m able to stick with this for my kids for the next 3 months during summer, imagine at the end summer my kids, if they’ve each got 20 YouTube videos that they’ve created and produced and published and edited, how much they learned during that time, versus if they sat home and just watched Ninja play video games, which would have happened had Brendon not mentioned the producer versus consumer thing.

So my challenge to you guys is to start shifting your mindset for yourself and for your kids from being a consumer of social media, to being a producer of social media. And I hope you will enjoy that, because it’s very important, and it will change your business and probably change your life. So there you go. I hope you guys love it, thanks again so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I recommend, get your kids and listen to it with them. Get them pumped about this summer and being a producer instead of a consumer. And let’s get our kids off their butts, off TVs and get them producing stuff that will change the world.

Alright guys, with that said, I gotta go. I got a busy day of fun things. I’m actually flying out tomorrow to go hang out with Dean and Tony. So by the time you guys get this, it will have probably been a couple of weeks ago, but I’m flying out tomorrow morning to go do, to film a whole webcast, webinar thing in Arizona with Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins, which is going to be so much fun. So I’m looking forward to that, I got a lot of work I gotta get done today, now, in preparation for that. So hopefully you guys have seen that whole launch, if not go back and check it out, because it’s been a lot of fun putting this whole thing together. Alright guys, thanks for everything and I will talk to you all soon. Bye.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.